Victor Erice

Victor Erice.

Victor Erice was interviewed at the National Film Theatre on the 2 September 2003 by Geoff Andrew.

This very rare on-stage interview covers Victor Erice's work, including both Lifeline, the acclaimed short film he made for the recent compilation Ten Minutes Older - The Trumpet, and the classic The Spirit of the Beehive, the feature debut that first brought him to the attention of international audiences.

Interview © BFI 2003

Lifeline

Geoff Andrew: Good evening. I'm Geoff Andrew, programmer of the NFT, and I'd like to welcome you here this evening. I'll let you in on a little secret: I've been here [at the NFT] about four years and every year I set myself a secret challenge. Actually, it's setting the NFT staff a secret challenge because they have to try and do what I want them to do. And it usually involves getting somebody here. I won't say who the people have been in the last three years but this year it was Victor Erice. He doesn't do this sort of thing very often. He doesn't make films very often, which is very sad but, on the other hand, I suppose, if he made more films he wouldn't make the kind of films that he does, which is why we value him. So I'm very, very pleased that he's agreed to come here this evening. It's a very rare appearance and I hope we'll all enjoy it.

I'd like to thank some of the people who have made this evening possible. I'd like to thank Optimum and Blue Dolphin - they know why. I won't tell you why but it's something to do with the films that are being shown. I'd like to thank all of the NFT staff, but particularly Stuart Brown and Lisa Moore, who have worked wonders to make this evening happen. Have an enjoyable and special evening.

[screening of The Spirit of the Beehive/El Espiritu de la colmena, Spain, 1973]

GA: Welcome back to a very special occasion where we welcome Victor Erice to the National Film Theatre. Before we start the interview we've got a little treat for you, which I don't think many of you will have seen. It's Victor's latest film, called Lifeline [from Ten Minutes Older - The Trumpet, UK-Ger, 2002], and it lasts about 10 minutes. Enjoy.

[screening of Lifeline, followed by Victor Erice and interpreter Corrina Downing to the stage]

GA: I think it's exquisite. Victor understands English but doesn't really speak it very confidently so we're going to be using Corrina as our translator. I'll ask Victor questions for a while and then we'll throw it open to you, the audience. And first, why don't we start with Lifeline? You don't make many films. Why did you make this one?

Victor Erice: First of all, I want to thank you all for coming and for being here today. And I want to apologise for not speaking any English. This film came out of a proposal that the producers of Ten Minutes Older brought to me with one stipulation: that the film must not last longer than ten minutes and that the main theme of the film should be 'time and the expression of time'. This is what inspired me to make this film.

GA: Can you talk about this theme [of time] itself, because that's something you've dealt with in all your films to date?

VE: Well, naturally, being a film-maker, because films are obviously full of time, especially if you compare them with other languages of art. The concept of time and duration - film is obviously best equipped to express it. Naturally all forms of art have expressed time in one way or another. But none has managed to contain it, as a bowl would contain water, as film has managed to do.

GA: The other thing that seems to be a theme in this film... Well, it obviously relates closely to your own life as it is set in the region you were born in, and I think it is set in June 1940 when you were born. How autobiographical is this?

VE: I try not to indulge too much in autobiographical aspects. Obviously I fear that it would only be looked at from that point of view and, in that case, I would consider my work to be a failure. I aspire to be able to reach more universal points than just my own story because I consider myself an ordinary or common citizen. Nevertheless, there are inevitably some autobiographical aspects because the theme of time, and the way it was proposed to me by the producers of this compilation, is a very abstract and philosophical thing. We don't know - I particularly think I don't know - what time really is. So I have tried to concretize or fill it out with something more solid, to try to give the images a sort of documentary feel. For instance, there are no professional actors in the film. I picked each one of those people from the actual village where we made the film. And, naturally, the film was nourished in a way by the memories that came down to me, via my parents, of my own birth.

GA: Why did you make it in black and white? Because all of your other films have been in colour...

VE: That's a good question. It was a very important problem for me. I actually filmed it in colour. The colour was very beautiful. But I understood that the image of blood in modern cinema - perhaps more the haemoglobin than the blood itself - and special effects... There is such a sort of total, or totalitarian, image of blood in contemporary cinema, so much so that in colour the blood became completely banal and just lost what I was trying to say with it. The cameraman kept saying it was very beautiful, but I never tried to achieve the beauty of the image. I tried to achieve the beauty of truth. I always took as my motto what Robert Bresson said: you don't have to make images that are beautiful. You have to make images that are necessary. And [Bresson] is a film-maker who was, first of all, a painter.

GA: That leads onto another question. You were a film critic yourself and you've always been a cinephile. What was it that attracted you to the cinema in the first place? When did you become interested in films?

VE: It's difficult to say. It's more like an experience. I don't feel that I chose cinema or films. I feel they chose me. I don't mean this to be pretentious. In my childhood, films were fundamentally important. In a country that, especially in the 1940s, was very isolated from the rest of the world and marked by the Civil War, films gave me an extraordinary possibility to be a citizen of the world.

GA: And did you always want to make films as well? Obviously, maybe not as a kid, but you did become a critic when you were quite young...

VE: It was an evolution, I suppose, and I became conscious of it when I was about 19. But you don't choose to be a film director when you are small. You would be a small monster. Also, you can say that nobody chooses whom to love.

GA: You wrote with great sensitivity and love about the films of Nicholas Ray, Josef von Sternberg, Carl Dreyer and others. With the possible exception of Carl Dreyer, I'm not sure that your own films are in the same universe as some of the people you admired. Do you feel there is a sense of continuity between the films you loved and advocated and the films you make?

VE: Whenever I hear somebody talk in these terms I can't recognise myself, because I find it hard to place myself in the history of cinema. In fact, I think I consider myself a better spectator than a director. But I realise that I have a different point of view of what a spectator is to that which producers normally take into account. For me, every spectator is a potential film-maker and, of course, without the spectator, the films would have no meaning, no reason to be. So I continue to go to films wherever I can and I to vindicate my work as often as possible. But I suppose I could say that cinema has helped me to live.

The Spirit of the Beehive

GA: Now we'll move on to The Spirit of the Beehive, which people here have watched this evening. I dare say a lot of them had seen it before. In that film, you do actually include a Hollywood film, Frankenstein [James Whale, US, 1931] but you use it for very metaphorical purposes. You do seem to have a liking for metaphor in your films.

VE: As a child, obviously I watched a lot of Hollywood movies. That was the cinema that we could see. And I feel that I was able to enjoy as a spectator a very extraordinary period in American films. I realise that, as a child, I watched films that I considered to be masterpieces, and that I still consider to be masterpieces today as an adult. Inevitably, the bulk of the films that we could see, and that I could enjoy, were American films. Even before I knew that Frankenstein was the product of the imagination of Mary Shelley, even before I read the book, I saw the film - so, for me, Boris Karloff is Frankenstein. So, in other words, the myths that we absorb in that first childhood remain with us forever.

But inevitably we grow up, so there was one day as an adolescent that I went into a cinema and I saw a film - it was a film that had been made about five years earlier but it was projected in Spain quite a long time later. This was Bicycle Thieves [Ladri di biciclette, Italy, 1948] by Vittorio de Sica. I was deeply moved by this film and so, at 12 or 13, I saw this film and realised that there was a whole other side to cinema that I had no idea about because it was so different to what I had known, all the Hollywood films. For the first time I saw realism in cinema, I saw faces like those I saw in the street, I saw situations that I could recognise. So that's probably the point where I could say I left innocence behind and moved to a more conscious period.

I became forevermore a desperate cinephile, and inevitably I went to all the cine clubs. So I go on developing but, nevertheless, always being quite faithful to my original feelings about cinema as a child. In this way I understood that films were not just a party, they could also be an act of resistance. I went to university in Madrid and I could probably say that there I had the most important experience with also another Italian film. Someone managed to get hold of a film from the Barajas airport for a few hours. It was one of the films that was totally banned in the Franco time but they managed to get it for three hours. The film was Rossellini's Rome, Open City [Roma città aperta, 1945]. It was [screened] in a clandestine projection [room] with 20 people. And it was a radical experience for me, not only because of the actual film itself and the value of its meaning, but [also due to] the fact we were in the Franco period and so what we were living as well. This reaffirmed my feeling that a film could be an act of resistance and I am deeply indebted to that experience. In my own way I try to continue to resist and to use film in that way.

GA: What was the appeal of showing this very painful experience - of a family scarred by the experiences of the Civil War - through the eyes of a child?

VE: How do you arrive at a story? Chance intervenes. You don't really know which path you are going to take. I believe deeply in chance. I had received a proposal to make a film on the theme of Frankenstein but actually in that genre. [It was to be a] completely commercial project. As I was desperate to make my first film and I'm very obedient, I started writing a conventional Frankenstein movie. But when I started to do the budget, chance happily intervened in my favour because that kind of film needs a lot of sets, and well-known actors, and the producer had to admit he didn't have quite enough funds. So I then proposed a Spanish version of Frankenstein - not quite so extravagant, without big sets and with only four weeks of filming. He liked that idea. But now I found myself with a very big problem. I wasn't quite sure what to do exactly. On my work desk I had cut out a picture, a frame from James Whale's Frankenstein, that moment when the monster and the child are together. It was there hanging in my room and I saw it every day, and then I understood that in that image everything was contained. So I called on my own personal experiences and I felt that the identification with the child and the film would be far greater if the infant was also a girl, as opposed to a boy. And so gradually the story started unfolding.

GA: The other thing that's immediately obvious about this film is that you have a visual style, which is meticulously beautiful and very like paintings. One thinks of Vermeer or Velazquez and other great painters. How do you approach the images of your films? Do you use a lot of storyboarding and do you plan it very much in advance?

VE: I believe very much in the actual experience. Although I have thought a lot about it, I don't really consider myself an intellectual. The little I have done has always come from experience. I believe in the less conscious - in other words, the subconscious or unconscious - experiences and feelings that gradually build up in our minds without our being too aware of it. Because the problem in art isn't only to have ideas, but how to express them and give them body and life - that is the difficulty. Obviously, in this film [The Spirit of the Beehive] my love of painting comes out. I went to Madrid to study things you can only study in Madrid, to find something that would appeal to my parents and allow me to go to Madrid, because in 1957 there were more than 200 cinemas and the Prado Museum. And, to be honest, I probably spent more time in the cinemas and in the Prado than I did in my classes.

The South and The Quince Tree Sun

GA: I understand that experience. I'd like to move on to your next film, The South [El Sur, Spain/France, 1983] which will be shown later on in our season. Some of you may remember it from when it was released in 1983. It's a quite wonderful film, I think, and is totally coherent, yet it's a film that was never finished. You weren't allowed to shoot everything that you wanted to, and it's shorter than it would have been as part of the story isn't there. Was that a very painful experience for you?

VE: Yes, it was very painful for the drama [of the film] but, of course, for film-makers this is quite a common occurrence. The film was interrupted for financial reasons. On the other hand, in terms of production it went very well, it was a happy time. Even in the state it is in, the film had a lot of commercial success in Spain, and especially from the critics. It should have been one hour longer, although many critics and spectators have applauded the fact that the south - which would be the south of the country - is never actually seen in the film. My taste is a little more common: I wanted to show it, especially as I was born in the north but lived many years of my life in the south. I felt that this was a wonderful opportunity to have the north and the south coming together in the film. Naturally this was a metaphor for the divisions that became apparent in the Civil War and, similarly, the divisions in a person who can't assimilate or join two parts of his own being.

The figure of the father in The South is a man divided between two loves: his romantic passion and his mundane life with his wife. It's about a man who always wants to go to the south but never manages to go. The train is always going past the station but he never manages to get on. He returns home like a clandestine person and he dies. And in a sense he leaves a mandate because, when he is about to die, he leaves under the pillow of his daughter the symbol of the communion, the thing that tied them together in their youth. This is the last thing that he does in his life so he is there, working like an impulse to provoke the daughter to make this trip that he was never able to make - and she does do what he could never do.

In the part that was never filmed, this girl does reach the south in Andalusia, where her father was born and lived his own childhood, so it completed the story of her father's death. In this way she was able to reconcile herself with the image of her father. This was the original project of the film. The film as it is now is still under the weight of the pain and, of course, the visit to the south was the redemption and she could grow up and become an adult. I can't say it would have been a happy film but there would have been a new energy and vitality because, in every story, to understand the history of one's parents is so important for every human being.

GA: I was going to ask you about the little melodrama Flor en la Sombre,which takes the place of the Frankenstein film in the [The South], because it's rather amusing. It almost looks like a Mexican melodrama to me. But Victor made it himself and I wondered if it was an attempt to make a little von Sternberg film.

VE: It's a small fragment, The Flower in the Shadow. I shot it myself and had a lot of fun doing it. There are certain influences of Von Sternberg in the lighting. I was a great admirer of Josef von Sternberg, especially in my twenties.His flamboyance, I think he is the master of flamboyance in the history of cinema.

GA: You also had a bit of fun making The Quince Tree Sun [El Solde Membrillo, Spain, 1991], which has got some very funny moments but is also different. For those of you who haven't seen it - you will be able to - it's sort of a documentary about an artist, Antonio López, who spends ages doing a very beautiful painting of a quince tree in his garden. But he takes so long and he's such a perfectionist that he keeps not being able to finish it, because time has its way with the tree and it changes. So it's really, I think, although a very fine portrait of Antonio López, it might possibly be a bit of a self-portrait. Is it a self-portrait of a meticulous person?

VE: I have this reputation, and I don't like to disappoint my friend [Geoff Andrew], but I'm far less of a perfectionist than Antonio the painter. I made this film in eight weeks and perhaps there is an autobiographical aspect in that we both experience life in a similar way and with similar obsessions. If you think about it, these are the greatest themes of Spanish Baroque art: the passing of time, dreams, decadence, and also the theme of childhood. These are themes that belong there. Also, we both have roots in the countryside - we are both from the countryside, the painter and myself.

GA: It's a very special film because it is a documentary, but he is very aware of the fact that you are there all the time, and we watch him. It's not like a fly-on-the-wall documentary. I wondered if sometimes you had said to him, 'What are we going to do today? Where would you like me to put the camera?'

VE: We didn't actually talk very much at all. If you think about it, the task of a painter is a solitary process, totally in contrast to a film-maker. The use of time for a painter is also so different to that of a film-maker. In painting, he's got an individual use of time and so he can use it with impunity, really. But for the film-maker, it's closer to an industrial process. He is surrounded by people and so he doesn't have the privilege of individual time. It's a collective time and its counted out in pennies. I was aware that our presence - the cameras and the sound people and so forth - was somehow modifying the way that the painter could work and his own private experience with the tree he was painting. Although I tried to respect as much as possible this relationship between the painter and the tree - which is obviously very mysterious and which I tried to express at the end of the film - I felt that the crew, while we were only six, could not but interfere in some way. This is why I actually showed the film camera at the end, to show my working tool, as it were. I even insinuate that it is our artificial lighting that is actually rotting the fruit on the tree. I feel that the language of painting belongs to the dawn of our time and civilisation and, in a similar way, cinema or films are the sunset. On the whole, cinema has a youthful image. But, in fact, I think it's exactly the opposite. Once I was speaking with the painter, Antonio López. 'Have you seen,' I said to him, 'how quickly the cinema has become old and at what speed? Like a child that has become prematurely old, if you think about it. Cinema has only had one hundred years and it has covered a huge amount of ground that has taken centuries and centuries for other arts to achieve.' Then Antonio replied, and it's something I'm never going to forget. Antonio said, 'Ah, but you see, cinema was born when man was already very old.'

Cinema and Spain

GA: I think we should allow some of you to ask some questions.

Q1: How is The Spirit of the Beehive situated today in the collective memory of Spain?

VE: It is probably the critics and the historians who should answer that. It's definitely cited often as a film that expresses the feelings of the post-Civil War generation, and in a very internal and internalised way, more in an impressionist way than in a realistic way.

Q2: We don't see many new Spanish films over here. Would you say that the cinema in Spain is in a healthy state?

VE: It hasn't really ever managed to be a proper industry in Spain. It always has an artisan aspect which, of course, is not a fault. But for certain types of film, this is not a good time for any country in the world, even in Europe. We know that European cinema is in danger of extinction. The danger is that if Europe as a whole doesn't recognise that regional or national cinema has its importance, the product of the whole world will become the same. The free market, with its voracious appetite, can probably make the product become just one single thing, as opposed to having many facets. And, of course, it is becoming just a product, because 90 per cent of films are seen as just a product rather than as art.

GA: I wanted to ask you something about this because, obviously, The Quince Tree Sun was a slightly different film for you to some extent. You were, for a while, your own producer, and it gave you a freedom because you had a small crew. When I was watching the film the other day it seemed to me like the film had almost anticipated what some of the Iranian film-makers are doing. I was reminded of Abbas Kiarostami, who has discovered the delight of using digital cameras because he doesn't need to worry about a crew and he can make films cheaply. Have you considered using them?

VE: New technology is introducing a new democracy or democratisation, in a sense, into the way films are made. The possibility is now with us that films can be made for very low budgets. Of course, the main problem is distribution. You can make the films but if nobody sees them, they don't exist. And the control of distribution is, of course, held in the hands of the United States, so much so that Spanish films can't even get shown in Spain. There are a percentage of films that get made and never get distribution. So it's vital to organise things so that [the films] do get a parallel and not a marginalised distribution. I continue to believe there is an audience for this kind of cinema. An example would be my film, The Quince Tree Sun which, despite its type of film, has had a lot of success and been seen in a great number of countries all over the world. Governments and organisations have to respect minorities as well, and allow these minorities to actually survive. For instance, Portuguese cinema has about five or six [film-makers whom] I admire very much. Obviously, its relative to the public, it's not that much. Of course, if you want to create some sort of a tradition or national qualities in a country, you have to make these films. And in Iran they are managing to do this. They are managing to create their own cinematic tradition which will be of great value to all future generations.

Q3: In The Spirit of the Beehive, the drawings in the opening credits are done by the little girls. Did you direct that and tell them to draw, or did you find them drawing and say, 'I could use this'?

VE: I asked them to do it. I gave them the subject matter and they drew. I encouraged them.

Further Projects

Q4: What were you doing in the ten-year periods between your films? Were you working on the scripts or were you doing other things, such as looking for funds?

VE: I might be slow but not quite that slow. I've just been working on many different projects. When I finally manage to make a film it's usually the consequence or the result of all the other ones I wasn't able to make. It might create an almost obsessive quality with the film I did manage to make, fixating almost. I've tried to maintain a more natural communication with the process of film-making because, obviously, with this process each film becomes an extraordinary event. I've always liked the thought of being the craftsman who goes every day to his workshop and tinkers away, so I am jealous of the painters who have this time to do just that. For instance, I was involved with a project for three solid years which had been commissioned by a producer. I have to work to commissions, I can't say I can just do what I like. So I was asked to adapt a novel and I said yes. I worked for three years and, sadly, in the end it was not made. But I'm happy to say I have managed to publish the actual script. In other words, I am always constantly trying to do something but it doesn't always get made.

Q5: What was the name of this project and what happened to it?

VE: The project that I worked on for three years was called Promise of Shanghai [El embrujo de Shanghai, Fernando Trueba, Spain, 2002]. The film was made eventually and the book was published, but I haven't actually seen the film.

Q6: How do you work with a composer?

VE: For The Spirit of the Beehive I worked with Luis de Pablo who is a great composer, one of the great European composers. With The South, I wasn't able to work with a composer as I didn't have the time, so I had to select pieces of Ravel and various other composers. With The Quince Tree Sun I worked with another composer and in Lifeline I used a well-known lullaby. I always feel that music is part of the soundtrack. Although it's obviously very important, I try to incorporate it into the whole world of sound on the film and not give it more importance than any other sound. I try to synthesise or purify it so, in a way, it's a sort of minimalist approach, to use it only when it's really necessary. I use it to create an atmosphere, not simply to underline something which is already there. But the music that I like the best is the sound produced by the editing of all the images. The rhythm of the images has a music of its own and that's much more difficult than just placing music on top of a film. And, of course, when you edit, it has so much to do with that rhythm. On the whole, I feel that contemporary films abuse the use of music in their films, because so often the images are actually dead and they are just trying to give life to the corpse.

Q7: How did you feel about coming back to short films at this stage in your career, something rarely done by film-makers?

VE: The requirements of a short are as big as that of a feature, really. More than 100 shorts are made every year in Spain. It is subsidised so a lot of young people obviously jump at the opportunity to show their abilities. Unfortunately, very often they reveal a lack of knowledge of cinema, and they would probably be better to try to go to college. Of course, with shorts the problem is distribution. But in terms of film-making, they have similar requirements to a longer film. But, as in literature, a short story or a long novel has requirements of its own. For instance, Borges only ever wrote short stories and yet he's a great writer. You could probably say if a short is boring, at least you won't be bored for long! And, in a way, it's just as demanding.

Q8: Have you ever taught film-making and how do you do it?

VE: Yes, I have taught, but only for six months. You can teach technique and things like that easily, especially now that young people are so used to technology. But the difficult thing is to learn how to see and I find it almost impossible to teach how to see.

Q9: I feel the 'poetic' is a central part of your cinema. Could you say something about what 'poetic cinema' is for you?

VE: Poetry and cinema were always linked to the avant-garde. Interestingly enough, it's the poets rather than the novelists who first really appreciated film. We can find many poems that actually refer to people like Buster Keaton and Chaplin and, of course, you can think of the Surrealists. Especially in the silent period, there was a great connection between poetry and film, because the silent film had a purer form of poetry in it than the current way of making films. In the 1960s Pier Paolo Pasolini actually distinguished it clearly and talked about 'prose film' and 'poetry film'. By 'poetry' I always think of it as film in the first person. Narration is more like a third party rather than a first party. Poetry is very much in the first person, we are very aware of the author. With prose, the narrator is in the background and he's not visible. And for commercial reasons, narrative prose is similar to the narrative in a film - it's easier to read and easier to understand. Narrative has survived because it's easy to understand and easy to read. With poetry, a bit like with painting, the figurative is easy to read and understand but when you have abstract painting it's a bit closer to poetry. Maybe in the [film] industry we have more of narrative but there's no doubt that the young people who are making films today want to bring in the poetry. That's what they are aiming at and you have to have faith, in a sense.

GA: That's a very good place to stop if there is a good place to stop. There is a book of essays on Victor's films, published by Scarecrow Press and called An Open Window: The Cinema of Victor Erice [ed. Linda C. Ehrlich, 2000]. Do look out for it, it's rather good, and do come and see the films in this season later this month. What we're going to show you now covers a few of tonight's questions - we were asked about music, about poetry, about narration, and Victor talked about something very important in his films, which is rhythm. I found it very difficult to come up with a closing clip but I did eventually. This film has its own special rhythm. I thought, let's close with a musical number, so you're going to see something from The Quince Tree Sun. But before you do that, would you please thank Victor Erice.